Much of the discussion here of the value of remaining within the Democratic Party or not proceeds from a fundamental error: the belief that the Democratic Party in some meaningful sense has ever been the property of "the people" (by which I mean the multi-racial working class that constitutes a solid majority of the population plus assorted allied "middle class" groups committed to various progressive projects).
This is not true. The Democratic Party has always been firmly in the grips of the economic elite (once plantation, now corporate) of this country. One can look at the Democratic Party as an alliance of various groups, but it is an alliance under the effective leadership of a corporate elite that largely defines the range of acceptable opinion within the party.
Running as an individual for precinct captain or committee member or state legislature will not change this fundamental fact. There may still be reasons to do such a thing, but it should not be undertaken with the illusion that by so doing one is incrementally loosening the grip of the corporate elite on the party. Much more likely is ones own integration into the already established way of doing things.
As I've argued elsewhere, the reputation of the Democratic Party as "the peoples party" proceeds mainly from its response to two popular insurgencies: the labor and unemployed movements of the 1930s and the civil rights/Black liberation movement of the 1960s. In both these cases the role of the Democratic Party was to coopt or deflect these movements from more radical trajectories.
Once you accept the basic fact that the Democratic Party is largely an instrument of corporate power all sorts of things start to make more sense.
The refusal of the party to pursue what people here would consider "winning" strategies that seek to mobilize the party's supposed base makes perfect sense if one understands that the party is beholden to an elite that doesn't really care which party wins, but that is deathly afraid of anything that threatens to reawaken the popular insurgencies that inflicted all sorts of profit-minimizing measures on the elite in the past (minimum wage laws, AFDC, that sort of thing).
What they are most afraid of is a movement that links domestic discontent up with opposition to the imperial foreign policy. The corporate elite may disagree among themselves on the wisdom of having invaded Iraq, but they are absolutely united around the principle that the rest of us should have no real voice in the matter.
This is why the Dean candidacy was targetted for corporate-media inflicted melt-down: it threatened to become the vehicle for a popular movement against the war. Personally I don't think Dean was so much of a threat, but the people in power in the Democrtaic Party were not going to take any chances.
The seeming gutlessness of the party in the face of the wholesale dismantlement of every imaginable social and environmental protection makes perfect sense if one understands that this is an agenda that increasingly enjoys a consensus within the corporate elite that dominates both parties. The truth is that Dems in Congress are NOT spineless when it comes to standing up for the interests of their base. Rather their base is not who some here imagine it to be. It is rather "the haves and the have mores" just as it is for the Republicans.
None of this is to suggest that there aren't real differences between the two parties or that there is never any point in participating in the electoral process or of even waging insurgencies within the party. The corporate elite is not monolithic in either its interests or its ideological predilections and some of those differences are manifested in differences between the parties. (One wing of the elite for example believes in the need for a revanchist religious morality as a source of social stability while the other wing sees these moves as dangerous, not least because they might spark popular resistance). The corporate elite is not a conspiracy (which is not to say that sections of it don't act conspiratorially on occasion). It is a ruling social class with many of the kinds of internal contradictions that exist in other social classes.
So what does this mean for us?
I would argue that it means that people who think one-dimensionally in terms of electoral politics as the only vehicle for social change need to a more multi-dimensional approach. Instead of throwing ourselves into preparations for the 2006 and 2008 elections I would argue we should be engaged in grassroots mobilizing against the war and for voting rights by building independent protest organizations that are willing to take to the streets and engage in civil disobedience. What we need more than loyalty to the Democratic Party is a movement that is dedicated to democracy and is willing to fight for it. Now, as in the past, that fight will take place largely outside the confines of existing party politics and will only be taken up by the Democratic Party in any meaningful sense when it threatens the "business as usual" operations of this society.